I have several reasons to look forward to the event. One of them is the conference live-tweeting. On the scale of several parallel sections and a whole week, it takes such proportions that you cannot dedicate just one person to it, and the archiving doesn’t get done by itself either. I have joined forces with Frederike Neuber and Lisa Bolz to try and archive the tweet reports and discussions as well as possible, especially because discussions are usually extremely rich in DH contexts and you might want to get back to one of them at some later point.

This requires those that tweet to follow as far as possible a few simple rules. There are basically 3 of them and they are really not complicated.

1- Don’t forget the hashtag: #dhd2015

** The hashtag is NOT #dhd15**

2. When you livetweet the content of a paper (or of a discussion), mention the name of the person you are quoting, for instance by beginning your tweet with “Last name:”

3. When you are taking part in a twitter discussion, make the follow-up easier to reconstruct by replying to the previous tweet. You might want to take out the name of the exact person you are replying to in order to have a few more characters at your disposal, but please do use the “reply to” function.

Tweeting at a conference can be tiresome, that is true. But on the other hand, the one who tweets follows debates in a completely different, much more immersed way, he/she engages in debates with people who are not in the room and can echo them in the discussion with the person who gives the presentation, he/she contributes to the dissemination and visibility of the conference’s scholarly advances, he/she makes it possible to refer to the conference itself as a space of intellectual debate. The whole community has something to gain from it. I would like to encourage everyone to contribute. And encourage to contribute even minimally, but as far as possible with actual scholarly content: what debates are risen, what positions are represented, what novelties are presented?

To sum up the main idea here:

Don’t forget the hashtag! #dhd2015

and stay tuned: we will post and tweet the storifies regularly from Monday on! (and don’t hesitate to contact one of us)

Anne Baillot

I studied German Studies and Philosophy in Paris where I got my PhD in 2002. I then moved to Berlin, where I have been living & doing research ever since. My areas of specialty include German literature, Digital Humanities, textual scholarship and intellectual history. I am currently working at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin as an expert in digital technologies for the humanities.

3 Responses

Sjoerd Levelt, Twitter at historical conference: how to introduce it to those who are not #twitterstorians themselves, in: Early modern/medieval histories, 9. 9. 2014, http://levelt.wordpress.com/2014/09/09/twitter-at-historical-conference-how-to-introduce-it-to-those-who-are-not-twitterstorians-themselves/

About rule 2: “…by beginning your tweet with “Last name:”” don’t forget that if you quote the speaker using his Twitter username, you’ll have to put a dot “.” before, in order to make the tweet visible to your own followers (and not only those following the #dhd2015 hashtag) 😉
Enjoy the conference!

Thank you Martin! I was pretty sure I would forget a few subtleties… feel free to elaborate if there are other details that might be more important than I thought.
Did I mention: Don’t forget the hashtag (#dhd2015) ;-)?